


Timestamp; Kitten Death Palace

by allwedidwaskiss



Series: Work In Progress 'Verse [3]
Category: Common Law (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-15
Updated: 2020-01-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:20:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22264765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allwedidwaskiss/pseuds/allwedidwaskiss
Summary: Travis’ Thoughts on the Build-a-Bear Franchise, Their Hiring Techniques and the State of Youth Today.Be warned, extremely graphic crack!writing and complete bastardization of Travis’ mental acuity.
Relationships: Travis Marks/Wes Mitchell (implied)
Series: Work In Progress 'Verse [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/35571
Kudos: 6





	Timestamp; Kitten Death Palace

**Author's Note:**

> Please see most recent notes on Series page.

Travis snuck a look at Wes, whose face was practically glowing in happiness. He decided that while he enjoyed that look on his partner’s face, he was going to keep the more annoying aspects of his sentimentality to himself.

Being with Wes made him feel like a supernova on the edge of eruption, the feeling multiplying and expanding at faster rate than he could make space in himself for the changes.

He had known beforehand what the physicality of it must feel like, his mind shifted to the fucking debacle with the bears (or the Kitten Death Palace, as he so fondly referred to it).

He’d tried, he really had, to have one of those expensive bears from that store in the mall stuffed for his little cousin Cynthia’s birthday a couple of years ago.

He should have known he’d made a bad bet when he walked into the entrance and there were these huge, like bigger than actual grizzlies, bears welcoming (or warning away) potential customers.

There were just sitting right there, in the open. Thank God that they were completely immobile at least and not those animatronic nightmares that everyone seemed so fond of lately but only reminded Travis of Skynet.

They weren’t moving but they had these huge, _watchful_ eyes, waiting to scare the living fricking daylights out of anxious toddlers and fully grown men alike, because, like, why did the giant ( _obviously_ nefarious) bears have to be, like, ten feet tall and wearing those horrific, empty smiles of the recently deceased?

He’d never realized it before, never even thought about it before, but teddy bears had the same exact pulled, hollow expressions of the dead people he looked at every day at work, their mouths up in an entirely unnatural curve, like a sideways parenthesis.

Travis had unwisely asked on his first day on Homicide why the corpses were smiling.

Unfortunately the medical examiner, Melanie (who should look into an interrogation career at Guantanamo Bay) had answered his question and Travis had learned the valuable lesson of never asking anything in the earshot of a medical examiner. Their living-people skills left much to be desired.

“Oh, they’re not,” Melanie had responded cheerfully, much to his chagrin.

“That’s just a post-mortem reaction of the muscles when rigor begins to set in,” she continued, looking glad for the excuse to talk to someone who wasn’t room temperature.

“The skin gets pulled up over the cheekbones and since the muscles are completely relaxed, because, hel-lo! No one in the driver’s seat anymore, they get that Stepford smile going.”

She had continued to busy herself with whatever it is that medical examiners do when they get a couple of fresh bodies to work with, practically childish in her glee.

“Did you know?” she continued conversationally, as though she hadn’t noticed that Travis looked like he was going to lose his lunch all over her juicy crime scene (and it _was_ juicy, he regretted noticing that fact immediately, and also, while he was at it, the use of that particular adjective), or maybe it happened all the time and Melanie just spent too much time around dead bodies with their death-grimaces cheerfully affixed on their still faces.

Maybe she was so used to the corpses being so pale, so very fucking _dead_ that maybe she just thought all living people always looked a little green.

That’s absurd, Travis reprimanded himself as he swallowed down what he hoped was a dry heave, though to his dismay, he might have tasted his previously awesome breakfast of a Grand Slam omelet with extra bacon, making a riotous bid for daylight.

Good Lord above, why did he go for the extra bacon? It was going to be his undoing, he was sure, he could practically feel it swimming in the back of this throat, just waiting to erupt in a veritable Vesuvius of literal vomit and more metaphorical, but still very tangible, shame.

She must see living people all the time, not just grinning dead people and the grimacing, green living people who had to stand over her and her precious bodies while she sits there making conversation.

Travis was hoping she wasn’t in the mood for any more small talk because if he opened his mouth again, he was going to lose his cookies (or rather his Breakfast That Was Previously for Champions but was now the meal choice of Chumps Who Upchuck All Over a Really Fresh Crime Scene on Their First Day on Homicide) and any dignity he’d ever had, all over Melanie and her shiny hair, which looked like she’d conditioned twice today, Travis noted absently, her corpse.

He diverted most of his mental energy on trying to command his stomach to obey him and stop doing whatever acrobatics it had deemed wise. Stop it; he thought sternly in the direction of his abdomen just as he tuned back into Melanie’s irritated voice.

“Did you know?” Melanie tried again when she realized she had lost Travis’ attention to the twisting (often confusing to himself, and he lived in here) labyrinth that was Travis’ attention span.

The doctors had actually diagnosed him with ADHD when he’d been about twelve, or at least tried to.

But his mom at the time, Raechel had protested, with the iron conviction of those who had grown up so used to getting what they wanted that people kept giving it to them in adulthood because they were fucking scary as shit.

“I’ll sue alla ya’ll sideways up a plate of biscuits if any one of ya’ll even make a prayer about tryin’ ta pump my baby full of those demon hormones,” she’d spat at the nice man in the lab coat.

Travis remembered that his name, Dr. Seth Meyers, had been sewn into the coat in blue thread and the good Doctor had worn a tired expression like his only wish was for people to stop coming to see him, just to yell at him when he did his job.

Raechel’s family had been deeply religious, that she had hailed just as deeply from the heart of Texas and was ridiculously fond of using obscure Southern idioms that she promised up and down were actual sayings.

She’d fallen in love him the moment she saw him, claiming enthusiastically “Well, aren’t you God’s Glory ta be? Lookit those gloriuus eyes in that darlin’ liddle brown face! Bright’r than a lightenin’ bug parade in tha dead of June, you handsome liddle scamp!”

And had been in his corner from day one, even before they’d met face-to-face. The social worker in charge of his case that year had warned her that he’d be a ‘handful’ but Raechel had insisted, in that loud-assed voice of hers:

“If the Good Lord hadn’t wanted some children to be a handful, why’d He’d Bless us with two hands apiece? I’ll tell ya why,” she’d cut off the sputtering social worker, “One hand ta hold ‘em still and the other ta box their ears!”

And Travis had known right then, waiting outside the room, like a prisoner before Death Row, that he would love this woman with all of his heart for every second he was with her.

And she had proceeded to spoil him rotten for the three years he was with her and they got on like a frog skating on a buttered skillet (one of her sayings), but he often found himself wondering how much calmer it would be in his head if she’d let them prescribe him Ritalin.

Zipping back to the present again, he realized that Melanie was waiting, with the patience of someone whose conversation partners often didn’t speak back, for him to respond, “Did I know what?” to her question, so he did.

He was relieved to notice that the incessant roiling in his stomach had calmed down somewhat, instead of Defcon One, his stomach lining had been slipped into Defcon Three, at least, Two if he wasn’t actively thinking about the corpse currently smiling up at him.

“Well, I was just going to say, it’s impossible for the living human body to replicate that smile, the muscles just don’t work that way. You see, after death, the epidermis takes on a sort of rubbery feel, kind of like cooked chicken skin. You know how when you get KFC without the breading and the skin just peels right off?” She ignored Travis’ loud gulp, if she even noticed and plowed right on, plucking at the guy’s face nonchalantly.

“So when the skin gets pulled upwards like that,” she gestured calmly with one hand, the other still holding the skin away from the corpse’s mouth, like they were sitting in a classroom or something, instead of hovering over some poor recently deceased John Doe that had been the victim of multiple, vicious stab wounds who she was currently using as a educational dummy.

Travis never did hear the end of the most disturbing biology lesson ever, because he had to move pretty quickly. He just barely made it to a trashcan in the corner of the room before he finally relinquished any and all control over his mutinous breakfast.

The thing was, after a couple of years, that smile was fine on dead people. It wasn’t the corpses’ fault that their facial muscles had started to stretch even before rigor set in and their skin turned to Play-Doh, giving them the perpetually fucking disturbing look of smiling.

But dead people also aren’t ten feet tall, looming over him by four feet and affixed in a storefront. And their smiles definitely aren’t as big as his head, whereas those bears, he was certain, were on loan from the gates of Hades strictly for the purpose of scaring the shit out of the poor souls who thought it was a good idea to try to spend their money here.

So he’d started off with his skin crawling, trying to tell him to get the shit out of that place, which is ridiculous, because he’s thirty years old, goddamn it, and his job is to look at dead bodies and he has a _gun_.

So take that, creepy, giant teddy bear from hell.

He will _not_ be given the heeby jeebs by a couple of creepy button eyes. No, make that hundreds of dead button eyes, watching him everywhere he turned. Of course, they’d have button eyes all over the place; it’s a store full of teddy bears.

He’d grabbed one with a tutu and a tiara, figuring that little girls liked shit like that, and if she didn’t then Azalea’s brother could bring her back and get her another one, because no way in the world was Travis ever, _ever_ coming back in this place without backup and possibly a flamethrower.

Spotting a sign that happily announced “Filling Station!” in bright, cheerful block letters, he clutched the ballerina bear in his hand and approached an empty station.

The perky nametag affixed crookedly to the girl’s ill-fitting blue vest as well as the chalkboard proclaimed the station was manned by Tiffany (there were three exclamation points after her name but the look on her face suggested that she had never used an exclamation point in her life and would probably strangle one if she could get her hands on it).

Travis noted that every other station had the assistant’s handwriting cheerfully scrawled, often with the exclamation points and various other embellishments their nametags shared, but Tiffany’s had her name, jagged-looking and in square letters, no decorations whatsoever.

He’d already been vaguely spooked, but when Tiffany had grabbed the bear from his hands like it had personally offended her without so much as a ‘how-do-you-do” and practically ripped opened the flap to its poor little back he knew that he had managed to get the only employee that hated happiness.

She continued her abuse as she rather roughly skewered the unfortunate ballerina bear, like, literally, onto one of those weird, metal protrusions sticking out of the wall. The dangerous looking spikes led to the vat of stuffing that was in the walls, thoughtfully exposed through Plexiglas, the white material being bounced around by jets of air, to prevent clumping, Travis supposed.

He tried to shake off his unease.

But then Tiffany (who Travis now had the sneaking suspicion hid under children’s beds and made threatening monster noises in her spare time) had pressed the pedal viciously enough that Travis heard it squeak out for mercy; but she was relentless, holding the bear in her talon-like grip, and the toy looked like it was in pain as its face inflated in a bumpy, _really_ disconcerting way.

Travis looked on in horror as its body started to fill out slowly and unevenly. One arm heavy and dilated filled out faster than the leg on the same side. The stuffing couldn’t get through and there were a couple of tense minutes of Travis fidgeting and Tiffany glowering at Bella the Ballerina who had begun to sport an unsightly tumor on her stomach.

And then the fabric bulged out even further and stretched until he was sure he’d have to get another bear and start over and he wasn’t sure he could deal with another ten minutes in this store but something finally gave in and the filling started to make its cancerous way down poor Bella’s little swollen cloth body.

He couldn’t say why this was causing him so much mental distress; he knew the bear was an inanimate object. But the process looked distinctly painful as he imagined the way the toy distended and expanded happening to his own body.

Travis watched the suffering of that poor little bear, in her pink, innocuous tutu, as Tiffany, the Antichrist, took out her rage on the world, because, how bad could it be? You sit around all day and stuff cute little teddy bears with their _creepy dead eyes_ that follow you everywhere, observing you; cataloguing your every move, waiting for the perfect time to rise up and…

Travis mentally shook himself, wondering why this place had him so fucking weirded out.

When she deemed the bear “fit to snuggle with” she’d essentially torn it off the hose, shoved a little fabric heart into its back with a motion more suited for tearing the bloody, still-beating, flesh counterparts out of people’s bodies.

She practically ripped the material on her back tying up the string and putting in the staples, shoved it back at him and told him, “I hope that bear brings lots of love and happiness with her,” almost accusatorially.

Then she shot him a glance that suggested she thought that he was the embodiment of everything wrong with the world and was personally responsible for Kony being stopped.

She turned on her heel and promptly stomped into the back room to, Travis could only assume based on his knowledge of the evil residing in Tiffany’s soul, find some of the cutest kittens she possibly could and murder them.

She’d probably dance naked in their innocent kitten blood afterwards, licking her knife as she made incisions across her own stomach… and shit, Travis really needed to stop watching those late-night slasher flicks on Spike because they were filling his head with truly goddamned disturbing images.

She was just a pissed off shop attendant that had been a little rough with his bear, she probably wasn’t into self-flagellation or anything else truly terrifying, except possibly, some light devil worship on the Sabbath.

Just as he’d put the thought out of his mind, he thought he heard the muted whimper of a small animal’s death rattle and he was _done_.

He needed out of this store which he was now certain was actually the portal to Cthulhu’s realm.

He’d even put money on the fact that that’s where the bear-abusing sociopath who did not deserve _any_ exclamation points after her name, let alone three (a pentagram would probably be more to her tastes, anyway) had slipped away to, eager to offer up mutilated baby cats and the broken bodies of desecrated stuffed animals to her dark master.

And before any of his insane thoughts could come tumbling out of his head in public, he’d practically run away from the store, abandoning Bella the Ballerina, whose only crime was looking adorable in a mini tutu, to her fate.

She was probably cursed anyway.

Fuck that noise; he still had time to stop at Hallmark to get Cynthia a bear that wasn’t party to kitten genocide, devil worship and seriously inhumane treatment of stuffed animals.

There no way was he ever going to that place again.

And so whenever he thought about the Kitten Death Palace, he remembered how he had learned that corpses are always happy to see you.

Thinking about it, Wes made him feel like that bear, that horrible misshapen bear that had lived and probably died at the hands of Tiffany, the sadist, from the kitten-death store.

But in a way that didn’t remind him of an altar of tiny little bones and floppy, empty teddy-bear skins all lying in a puddle of blood.

And Travis was entirely done with any movie aired after midnight; obviously his imagination was insanely overactive.

Damn it, Raechel.

He _really_ needed to see a doctor.


End file.
